6th edition
Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University
Chapter 15
Social Psychology
and Health
“Twixt the optimist and the pessimist
the difference is droll:
The optimist sees the doughnut
but the pessimist sees the hole.”
—McLandburgh Wilson, 1915
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
STRESS AND HUMAN HEALTH
1. When people undergo a major upheaval in
their lives, such as losing a spouse, declaring
bankruptcy, or being forced to resettle in a
new culture, their chance of dying increases.
2. Soon after a major earthquake in the Los
Angeles area, the number of people who died
suddenly of heart attacks increased.
3. Many people experienced psychological and
physical problems after the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001.
How do these stress effects occur?
How can we learn to cope most effectively?
Resilience
Resilience
Mild, transient reactions to stressful events,
followed by a quick return to normal, healthy
functioning.
Although life's traumas can be painful, many
people have the resources to recover quickly.
Surprisingly few people show prolonged, negative
reactions to the most terrible events.
Effects of Negative Life Events
Hans Selye (1956, 1976) defined stress
as the body’s physiological response to
threatening events.
Stress
The negative feelings and beliefs that arise
whenever people feel unable to cope with
demands from their environment.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Effects of Negative Life Events
• Selye focused on how the human body
adapts to threats from the environment,
regardless of the source, whether
psychological or physiological.
• Later researchers have examined what it
is about a life event that makes it
threatening.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Effects of Negative Life Events
• Holmes and Rahe (1967), for example,
suggested that stress is the degree to which
people have to change and readjust their lives
in response to an external event.
• This definition of stress applies to happy events
as well, if the event causes big changes in one’s
daily routine.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Effects of Negative Life Events
• Holmes and Rahe (1967) developed a measure
called the Social Readjustment Rating Scale.
• Participants get a list of life events, such as
"divorce" and "trouble with boss," each of which
has been assigned a certain number of points,
depending on how stressful it is.
• People check the events that have happened to
them in the past year and add up the points
associated with these events, to get an overall
"life change" score. Several studies have found
that the higher the people’s score, the worse
their mental and physical health.
Being raped; or Finding out that you are HIV-positive
100
Being accused of rape
98
Death of a close friend
97
Death of a close family member
96
Contracting a sexually transmitted disease (other than AIDS)
94
Concerns about being pregnant
91
Finals week; or concerns about your partner being pregnant
90
Oversleeping for an exam; or flunking a class
89
Having a boyfriend or girlfriend cheat on you; ending a steady date relationship; or serious illness in family
85
Financial difficulties
84
Writing a major term paper; or being caught cheating on a test
83
Drunk driving; or sense of overload in school or work
82
Two exams in one day
80
Cheating on your boyfriend or girlfriend
77
Getting married
76
Negative consequences of drinking or drug use
75
Depression or crisis in your best friend; or difficulties with parents
73
Talking in front of a class
72
Lack of sleep ; change in housing (hassles, moves); competing or performing in public
69
Getting in a physical fight; or difficulties with a roommate
66
Job changes (applying, new job, work hassles); declaring a major or concerns about future plans
65
A class you hate
62
Drinking or use of drugs
61
Confrontations with professors
60
Starting a new semester
58
Going on a first date
57
Registration; or maintaining a steady dating relationship
55
Commuting to campus or work, or both
54
Peer pressures; or being away from home for the first time
53
Getting sick; or concerns about your appearance
52
Getting straight A's
51
A difficult class that you love
48
Making new friends; getting along with friends; or fraternity/sorority rush
47
Falling asleep in class
40
Attending an athletic event (e.g., football game)
20
The College Life Stress Inventory
Instructions: Copy the "stress rating"
number into the last column for any event
that has happened to you in the past
year, then add these scores.
Perceived Stress and Health
Measures such as the College Life Stress
Inventory have problems:
• Subjective situations have more impact on
people than objective situations.
• Individuals vary in response to different
situations.
• Most studies on stress effects use
correlational findings, not experimental.
Feeling in Charge:
The Importance of Perceived Control
Internal-External Locus of Control
The tendency to believe that things happen
because we control them versus believing that
good and bad outcomes are out of our control.
Perceived Control
The belief that we can influence our environment
in ways that determine whether we experience
positive or negative outcomes.
College students are becoming convinced that
good and bad things in life are outside their control.
Increasing Perceived Control in
Nursing Homes
• Even a small boost in feelings of control
can prolong life.
• 18 months after nursing home residents
were given simple control over a movie
night and watering a plant, 15% had died
compared to 30% not given choices.
Disease, Control, and Well-Being
1. The relationship between perceived
control and distress is more important to
members of Western cultures than
members of Asian cultures.
2. Even in Western societies, there is a
danger in exaggerating the relationship
between perceived control and health.
Knowing You Can Do It:
Self-Efficacy
Believing that we have control over our
lives is one thing; believing that we can
actually execute the specific behaviors
that will get us what we want is another.
Self-Efficacy
The belief in one’s ability to carry out
specific actions that produce desired
outcomes.
Knowing You Can Do It:
Self-Efficacy
People’s level of self-efficacy has been
found to predict a number of important
health behaviors, such as the likelihood
that they will:
–
–
–
–
quit smoking
lose weight
lower cholesterol
exercise regularly
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Knowing You Can Do It:
Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy helps in two ways.
1. It influences our persistence and effort
at a task.
2. Self-efficacy influences the way our
bodies react while we are working
toward our goals.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Knowing You Can Do It:
Self-Efficacy
In short, self-efficacy operates as a kind of
self-fulfilling prophecy.
The more you believe that you can
accomplish something, such as quitting
smoking, the greater the likelihood that
you will.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Other people can help us gain self-efficacy.
Explaining Negative Events:
Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness
The state of pessimism that results from
attributing a negative event to stable,
internal, and global factors.
Stable Attribution
The belief that an event is caused by factors
that will not change over time (e.g., your
intelligence), as opposed to factors that will
change over time (e.g., your effort).
Explaining Negative Events:
Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness
The state of pessimism that results from
attributing a negative event to stable,
internal, and global factors.
Internal Attribution
The belief that an event is caused by things
about you (e.g., your own ability or effort),
as opposed to factors that are external to
you (e.g., the difficulty of a test).
Explaining Negative Events:
Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness
The state of pessimism that results from
attributing a negative event to stable,
internal, and global factors.
Global Attribution
The belief that an event is caused by factors
that apply in a many situations (e.g., your
intelligence,) rather than specific factors that
apply in only a limited number of situations
(e.g., your musical ability).
COPING
WITH
STRESS
Coping Styles
The ways in which people react to
threatening events.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Fight-or-Flight Response
Responding to stress by either attacking the
source of the stress or fleeing from it.
Tend-and-Befriend Response
Responding to stress with nurturant activities
designed to protect oneself and one’s
offspring (tending) and creating social
networks that provide protection from threats
(befriending).
Gender Differences in
Coping with Stress
Shelley Taylor and her colleagues (2000) pointed
out a little-known fact about research on the
fight-or-flight syndrome: Most of it has been
done on males.
Tending has a number of benefits for a mother
and her child (e.g., a quiet child is less likely to
be noticed by predators, and nurturing behavior
leads to lower stress and improved immune
functioning in mammals).
Befriending involves the creation of close ties with
other members of the species, which also
confers a number of advantages.
Social Support:
Getting Help from Others
Social Support
The perception that others are responsive
and receptive to one’s needs.
People who have someone to lean on deal
better with life’s problems and show
improved health.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Social Support:
Getting Help from Others
People who live in cultures that stress
interdependence and collectivism suffer
less from stress-related diseases than
people who live in cultures that stress
individualism, possibly because it is easier
for people in collectivist cultures to obtain
social support.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Social Support:
Getting Help from Others
Interestingly, it is not just receiving social
support but giving it that is beneficial: A
recent study of people 65 and over found
that those who gave support to others,
such as helping family members with
child care or doing errands for a neighbor,
lived longer than people who did not.
Social Support:
Getting Help from Others
According to the buffering hypothesis, we
need social support only when we are
under stress.
• Social support can help us interpret an
event as less stressful than we otherwise
would.
• Even if we do interpret an event as
stressful, social support can help us cope.
Personality and Coping Styles
• Evidence indicates optimistic people react
better to stress and are generally
healthier than pessimists.
• Most people feel bad events are less
likely to happen to them than to other
people.
• Unrealistic optimism, however, can leave
people unprepared for problems.
Personality and Coping Styles
Type A Personality
The type of person who is typically
competitive, impatient, hostile, and
control-oriented, when confronting a
challenge.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Personality and Coping Styles
Type B Personality
The type of person who is typically
patient, relaxed, and noncompetitive
when confronting a challenge .
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Personality and Coping Styles
Type A people’s hard-driving, competitive
approach to life pays off in some respects:
1. They tend to get good grades in college and to
be successful in their careers.
However, this success comes with some costs.
2. Type A individuals spend relatively little time
on nonwork activities and have more trouble in
balancing their work and family lives.
3. Further, numerous studies show that Type A
individuals are more prone than Type B
people to developing coronary heart disease.
Personality and Coping Styles
Subsequent studies have tried to narrow
down what it is about the Type A
personality that is most related to heart
disease.
The most likely culprit is hostility.
Competitiveness and a fast-paced life might
not be so bad by themselves, but for a
person who is chronically hostile, they
increase the risk for coronary disease.
Personality and Coping Styles
You are more likely to be Type A if
• You are male,
• Your parents are Type A, and
• You live in an urban rather than a rural
area.
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Personality and Coping Styles
There is a higher rate of coronary disease in
many Western cultures than in many Asian
cultures, such as Japan.
• In Western cultures, where individualism and
competitiveness are prized, personality types
more like Type A might be encouraged.
• People who live in cultures that stress
collectivism might have more support from
other people when they experience stress, and
as we have seen, such social support is a
valuable way of making stress more
manageable.
Opening Up:
Making Sense of Traumatic Events
• Opening up about traumatic events can
create more stress in the short turn.
• It can help alleviate some stress in the
long run.
• On the other hand, it can also make
stressful events more memorable in
cases in which they would have been
generally forgotten.
Opening Up:
Making Sense of Traumatic Events
• Trying to suppress negative thoughts can
lead to a preoccupation with those very
thoughts, because the act of trying not to
think about them can actually make us
think about them more.
• Writing about or confiding in others about
a traumatic event may help people gain a
better understanding of the event and
thus move forward with life.
PREVENTION:
PROMOTING
HEALTHIER
BEHAVIOR
Preventable Health Problems
Many serious health problems are
preventable, if people adopted different
habits and avoided risky behaviors.
For example, more than 40 million people
are currently infected with the HIV virus,
and in 2004, more than three million
people died of AIDS.
As seen in the next slide, most cases are in
Sub-Saharan Africa, though no continent
is free of the disease.
Most of these cases could have been avoided if
people had used condoms during sexual intercourse,
yet many people are not taking precautions they
should.
Preventable Health Problems
People could improve their health behaviors
in many other areas as well, such as:
– alcohol consumption
– smoking
– overeating
Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.
Preventable Health Problems
Binge drinkers are more likely to have a
number of life-threatening problems:
• high blood pressure • car accidents
• drowning
• heart disease
• domestic violence
• meningitis
• sexually transmitted diseases
Social Psychological Interventions:
Targeting Safer Sex
A review of the more than 350 interventions
designed to promote safer sex confirmed that it
works to increase people's self-efficacy about
condom use.
Other approaches work as well, such as
interventions based on the theory of planned
behavior, which try to increase:
(a) desirability of condom use
(b) perceived normative pressures to use condoms
(c) perceptions that condom use is controllable
Social Psychological Interventions:
Targeting Safer Sex
Another type of intervention that has been
successful is one that frames the
message in terms of gains (e.g., “If you
use condoms, you can stay healthy and
avoid sexually transmitted diseases”)
instead of losses (e.g., “If you don’t use
condoms, you could get AIDS”).
Social Psychological Interventions:
Targeting Safer Sex
1. When trying to get people to behave in
positive ways that will prevent disease,
it is best to use a “gain frame,”
emphasizing what they have to gain by
engaging in these behaviors.
2. When trying to get people to detect the
presence of a disease, it is best to use a
“loss frame,” emphasizing what they
have to lose by avoiding this behavior.
6th edition
Social Psychology
Elliot Aronson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
Robin M. Akert
Wellesley College
slides by Travis Langley
Henderson State University